I miss perl's -B

Published 2006-08-18 @ 00:59

Perl has a bunch of tests in form of -X path (e.g., -f path returns true if path exists and is a file). We have a direct analog with the test method (e.g., test ?f, path). The one we’re missing is -B, which tests whether or not a file is (probably) a binary file. It is great for things like Find-based scripts. Recently I needed it for a script I was writing so I didn’t have to keep adding file extensions I didn’t want to process. Here it is: